Death in Afghanistan

A lesbian soldier’s mysterious death in Afghanistan raises many questions—including why more fallen service members have not been identified as gay. William Henderson investigates.

From The Advocate December 4, 2007

On Friday, September 28, Army specialist Ciara Durkin, a 30-year-old corporal in the Massachusetts National Guard, was found dead with a single gunshot wound to her head at the Bagram Airfield military base in Afghanistan. Four days later, she was outed by her family as a lesbian -- the first casualty of the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq to be posthumously identified as lesbian or gay. If any of the other some 4,000 U.S. soldiers killed in either conflict thus far have been gay, their families haven’t said. But given the mysterious circumstances of Durkin’s demise, her family felt compelled to go public.

“Ciara was a lesbian and that’s bound to come out,” her sister, Fiona Canavan, said October 2 in a statement to media outlets in Boston, near the Durkin family’s adopted hometown of Quincy. “It is possible that someone over there found that out, and maybe they were very homophobic.” She added that Durkin, who had been home on leave from Afghanistan just weeks before her death, had told her and her other siblings -- Ciara was the eighth of nine children in her Irish family -- that “she had concerns about things she was seeing when she was over there. She told us if anything happened to her, that we were to investigate it.”

But the decision to disclose Durkin’s sexual orientation was not easy—and perhaps illustrates why other families have not been as forthcoming. Durkin’s family was concerned about her survivor benefits. According to Servicemembers Legal Defense Network, “don’t ask, don’t tell” ends at death; gay and lesbian casualties receive the same financial considerations as heterosexual casualties. Even so, the family decided to hold off on outing Durkin until after they had met with a military liaison. Relatives went so far as to ask the two LGBT newspapers in Boston not to run stories mentioning her sexual orientation, which was widely known in the local gay community, mostly because her gay brother, Pierce, is clerk of the Boston pride committee.

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